💸BTC’s price at the start of the year is always its own story.

Let’s see how it’s evolved over time.

January 3, 2009 — Bitcoin network launch and the mining of Satoshi Nakamoto’s first block
2010 – ~$0.00
2011 – $0.29
2012 – $5
2013 – $13
2014 – $754.22
2015 – $315
2016 – $434
2017 – $998
2018 – $13,445
2019 – $3,880
2020 – $7,190
2021 – $29,389
2022 – $47,737
2023 – $16,615
2024 – $44,162
2025 – $94,419
2026 – $87,512

Lighter is launching its $LIT token. The direction is clear, but the model deserves a closer look 🔍

Lighter, an Ethereum-based L2 DEX for perpetual futures, has introduced its native token $LIT. 25% of the supply will be distributed via an airdrop at TGE, another 25% is allocated to ecosystem growth. The remaining 50% goes to the team (26%) and investors (24%), with a one-year cliff followed by linear vesting over three years.

🎯 The key point here is how the team approaches token value.

According to Lighter, all economic value generated by the protocol’s products and services is meant to accrue directly to $LIT.

In practice, the token is used as:
✔️ a staking asset within execution and validation infrastructure,
✔️ a fee token,
✔️ an asset used for market data and price validation.

📈 This setup reflects a more mature market trend: moving away from purely governance tokens toward tokens that are deeply embedded in a protocol’s business model. That said, the combination of airdrop + staking + multi-layer utility almost always calls for a deeper tokenomics review.

Especially when it comes to:
▫️ revenue sources,
▫️ incentive sustainability,
▫️ long-term balance between ecosystem participants.

⚙️ We’re already digging deeper into $LIT’s model and will share our take on how sustainable this economy really is.

🔥 Token burning doesn’t make a token deflationary.

It’s just a tool, not a standalone solution.

A token has to work as a means of payment. In practice, that means functioning as a currency. Users should spend it on real value. For example:

▪️launching an AI agent (VIRTUAL)
▪️paying protocol fees (HYPE)
▪️using the network (ETH)
▪️paying for due diligence (8Lends)

But even that isn’t enough. You also need to define upfront how tokens are taken out of circulation. That can include:

▫️burning a portion of tokens earned as fees (BNB)
▫️buyback mechanisms that encourage long-term locking inside the protocol (HYPE)

And there’s one more factor that can’t be ignored: market demand 📈

If you have a product users genuinely want, you can skip most of the mechanics above and control supply through cliffs and vesting instead.

Here’s a simple example👇

Imagine users want to buy 10 tokens a day, while only 5 are being sold. If just 3 new tokens unlock daily, the market runs into a steady shortage of 2 tokens per day.

⚠️ That’s where everything comes together:

Real deflation comes from balancing supply and demand. When the market wants to buy and use more tokens than it can get, price moves up.

And this is the most important point in the entire series:
If there’s no real product backing the token, there’s no demand.
And without demand, deflation won’t save it.

According to data from CryptoRank, only 12% of tokens launched in 2025 are still trading above their sale price. In other words, 88% failed as long-term investments 📉

At first glance, that makes Web3 look like a casino 🎰

But a closer look points to a structural issue, not randomness.

Most launches blur the line between investment assets and speculative instruments. When everything is positioned as “investable,” nothing really is.

Separating tokens by intent changes the picture:

🔸Investment tokens – designed for long-term value capture
🔸Speculative tokens – built for liquidity, volatility, and narrative

This isn’t a broken market. It’s one with misaligned expectations.

And the question here isn’t why 88% failed. It’s how to spot which tokens were never meant to be held in the first place.

🎁 Telegram gifts: a new chapter for NFTs or Durov’s money vacuum?

Back in late 2024, Telegram rolled out gifts you could buy and send inside the app.

At first, they were just cute visuals. No real purpose. No utility. And honestly, many users were still trying to figure out Stars, so gifts felt… extra.

Interest was low, which made sense. But that didn’t last 👀

By summer 2025, Telegram dropped its first major collaboration, teaming up with Snoop Dogg. A few months later, gifts started showing up at auctions. And throughout 2025, simple gifts slowly began to gain “meaning”: staking, liquidity pools, gated community access, and other mechanics the Web3 crowd knows well.

In other words, gifts started turning into something more than digital souvenirs.

The numbers tell the story:

⭐️ By the end of 2025, total Telegram gifts sales crossed $296M
⭐️ Market cap reached $128M
⭐️ More than 2M users now hold nearly 9M gifts
⭐️ 118 out of 137 gift types are in circulation, with 86 already fully onchain

At first glance, it all looks pretty impressive. So why does the NFT gifts market still feel bearish?

The answer is simple. When users buy gifts, that money doesn’t really flow back into the market. It flows to Durov.
Today, Telegram gifts function as a capitalization tool for a single company, not as a living ecosystem where value circulates between participants.

⚠️ And that’s the real risk.

If Telegram doesn’t find a way to bring user money back into the market, demand for NFT-style speculation will slowly dry up. Along with the balances in users’ wallets.

🍀 2026 is starting surprisingly well for the United States

And it’s not just about access to some of the world’s largest proven oil reserves. There’s a far more interesting asset on the radar right now: Bitcoin linked to the Venezuelan regime.

If the rumors turn out to be true, the US Department of Justice could gain access to up to 660,000 BTC. According to sources, these coins were allegedly used by Maduro’s regime to settle sanctioned oil deals.

Context matters here.

The US has been very clear: it doesn’t plan to buy Bitcoin for its strategic reserve. Instead, that reserve is being built exclusively from confiscated assets. Every BTC currently under US control came from seizures, not market purchases. And that’s what makes the Venezuela story especially telling.

Based on confirmed onchain data, Venezuela officially holds only around 240 BTC. But that’s not what the market is focused on. The real attention is on a potential shadow reserve, mentioned by analysts and sources.

And if even a fraction of those estimates turns out to be accurate, the old question comes back into play:

🏎 Who wins the race to become the largest BTC holder?

Because suddenly, the US Department of Justice has a real chance to overtake BlackRock as early as the beginning of 2026.

💰Telegram thought in platforms. Base thinks in creators.

Telegram gave Web3 its first wave of mini apps. Some of them pulled in millions of users in just weeks. Then the hype faded fast.

Weak project economics turned those mini apps into hate magnets. Most were abandoned.

And the problem wasn’t the format. It was who made money and how.

Base doesn’t have a messenger with hundreds of millions of users. So instead of squeezing attention out of an audience, they chose a different path:

financial incentives for creators and users.

⚙️ First came the “super app” – Base App. On top of it, creators started launching their own mini apps and monetizing in a few ways:

• earning rewards based on engagement with apps and posts
• selling apps, posts, games, and other content
• joining airdrops or running their own

Base’s core focus is content and creators. And creators can go even further by turning posts into ERC-20 tokens anyone can buy.

⚖️ That’s where the real line is drawn.

Telegram tried to make money from creators. Base is trying to create conditions where creators make money. That’s why mini apps on Base aren’t just another format. They’re an attempt to finally close the missing link between

created → ??? → earned

Let’s see if it works this time 😏

🤨 Everyone’s asking why Telegram is selling $TON. The more interesting question is how TON got here in the first place.

The story starts back in 2018.

That’s when Pavel Durov launched the $GRAM token ICO and raised $1.8B from major investors. At the time, it was one of the biggest and loudest rounds the industry had ever seen.

Then 2019 happened.

U.S. regulators stepped in. The GRAM launch was blocked. The ICO was ruled unlawful, largely because U.S. citizens had participated in the sale. That’s where the rollback began.

Telegram had to return the money to investors. The only problem was that Durov had already spent it 🤷‍♂️

To deal with the fallout, Telegram raised $1B through eurobonds to cover part of the refunds. Not long after, a “non-affiliated” nonprofit showed up in Switzerland – the TON Foundation. That’s where $TON came from.

Years pass. But debts don’t disappear. And this is where things get interesting.

In March 2026, Telegram has to repay that same $1B in bonds. That leaves one obvious question. If not from TON, where exactly is that money supposed to come from? 😈

🥊 ETF vs RWA. Who has more upside?

Right now the market is being shaped by two powerful money flows. One moves from traditional finance into crypto. The other goes the opposite way, from crypto into traditional assets.

Each flow relies on its own instrument. And it feels like the right moment to compare their real growth potential.

📊 ETF (Exchange-Traded Fund) is the way traditional markets bring real dollars into crypto. Funds collect capital, buy crypto via OTC desks or through stablecoin conversion, and then those assets simply sit on fund wallets.

This model comes with clear trade-offs:

➕ Fresh capital enters the market and token prices move higher
➖ Tokens leave circulation, volatility increases, and liquidity gets thinner

🏗 RWA (Real-World Assets) work differently.

Here, money flows into tokenized real-world assets that are sold for crypto. The assets get locked, while crypto markets receive something else, a cash flow generated by real economic activity.

So which approach has more room to grow?

ETF growth is limited by the size of the Web3 market itself. Today that market is around $3.1 trillion, with $1.8 trillion coming from BTC alone.

RWA look at the entire global financial market. And that is a completely different scale:

• Commercial real estate at $32 trillion
• Securities markets at $128.1 trillion

From a market-size perspective, RWA clearly have more upside than ETFs. But size alone doesn’t create demand. What really matters is the problem an instrument solves.

ETFs have already found their role. They act as a bridge for institutions moving from traditional markets into crypto. But RWA face a tougher question:

if real estate and other assets can already be bought with crypto without RWA, what is their actual mission?

That’s the question this market will have to answer🤔

📣 Media outlets quote Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong pointing to interest paid on China’s digital yuan as a competitive advantage. But this is exactly where the discussion goes wrong.

CBDCs are not stablecoins. And confusing the two leads to false conclusions.

Armstrong uses the digital yuan as an example when talking about yield and “benefits for ordinary people.”

The problem is that a CBDC and a stablecoin are fundamentally different instruments.

A CBDC can only be issued by a central bank. A stablecoin, on the other hand, can be issued by any company that holds bank deposits and proper reserves.

💰 Interest on the digital yuan is not a sign of a strong monetary model. It’s a demand incentive. Essentially, a subsidy from the banking system to push users into a new form of money.

If we’re talking specifically about yield-bearing stablecoins, those already exist. USDL, for example, distributes income from its reserves on a daily basis.

And against that backdrop, one more fact stands out. In 2024, Tether earned around $13 billion in interest income and paid USDT holders… $0.

Not because it couldn’t. But because it never promised to 🤷‍♂️

The stablecoin market won’t change because of CBDCs. The real turning point will come when a mass-market crypto dollar appears that:

▪️ shares yield transparently
▪️ remains competitive on liquidity
▪️ and is easy for regular users to understand

When that happens, Tether’s leadership will no longer look untouchable.

An economy built for good times 🫧

One of the oldest patterns in DeFi hasn’t really changed. Tokens get launched first. Demand is expected to catch up later.

In 2025, Hyperliquid decided not to play that game. Instead, they built a very tight liquidity support system. One that directly ties the token to the exchange itself.

The idea is simple and, honestly, elegant:

When the exchange earns, the token benefits

99% of all fees go straight into buying back HYPE. Every trader opening a position is indirectly supporting the token’s price.

🔥 The recent one billion dollar burn takes this even further. This is no longer just about mechanics. It’s a clear signal. The team is willing to give up short-term revenue to reinforce long-term stability.

But this design comes with a condition:

It works beautifully while trading activity stays high.

If volumes drop, say by three times, something the crypto market has seen more than once, the buyback mechanism naturally loses strength. The unlock schedule for the team and funds, meanwhile, doesn’t pause. It simply continues.

There’s another delicate layer here.

Twenty-one validators and a relatively small group of large holders control a meaningful share of the supply. Any sharp move from that group could pressure liquidity faster than automated systems can adjust.

Taken together, HYPE’s token model looks like a system optimized for performance during strong market conditions. It’s efficient. It’s aligned. But it doesn’t leave much room for stress.

There’s no built-in buffer for a real slowdown.

If volumes fall, the system doesn’t break overnight. But it does start carrying the full weight of its own emissions.

No room for mistakes.

🏦 Morgan Stanley plans crypto ETFs for $BTC and $SOL

A Bitcoin ETF is already a baseline instrument for institutional portfolio construction. $SOL, however, represents a more deliberate and forward-looking choice by the bank’s analysts.

Morgan Stanley will acquire $SOL via third-party custodians and stake the assets to generate yield. This approach supports not only $SOL price, but also TVL across the Solana DeFi ecosystem.

Institutions are no longer just buying the asset.

They’re optimizing for yield from day one 📈

📊 According to CoinGecko, around 5.3 million tokens were launched in 2024 on Pump.fun alone. Not listings. Actual deployed tokens.

In 2025, the picture became even clearer. On Solana launchpads, the average number of new tokens per day ranged from 56,400 in January to 26,200 in September. Even using rough averages, that’s 10-15 million tokens a year in just one slice of the market.

⚠️ And here’s the part that matters.

The majority of these tokens can’t have a product by definition.

Not because teams “didn’t try hard enough,” but because it’s economically impossible. Product development and distribution simply don’t scale at the same speed as token deployment.

When we talk about tokens with real business utility, we mean tokens that:

🔸are used to pay fees,
🔸grant access to a service,
🔸secure a network,
🔸connect directly to real cash flows.

Those launches aren’t measured in millions. They’re measured in hundreds per year.

📌 If you aggregate data from multiple sources, the picture looks like this:

~50–200 tokens per year have real, working utility.
~200–600 tokens have partial utility: something exists, but demand is propped up by incentives, or the product hasn’t proven itself yet.

The result is a sharply divided market.

There’s a small layer of projects where the token is deeply embedded into the product and actually needed. They’re rare because they require serious engineering, thoughtful token design, and a solid economic model.

And then there’s a massive layer of tokens with no product at all. Simply because today, launching a token is cheaper and faster than building a landing page for it.

In sheer numbers, the gap between tokens with real utility and tokens without a product is measured in tens of thousands.

And that explains a lot 👀

📉 CoinGecko analyst Shaun Paul Lee points out that memecoin prices fell sharply after the events of October 10.

But the problem is not October. And it is not crises or Black Swans either. Meme coins, like many other tokens, fall for a much simpler reason. They have no utility.

They are simply not needed.

Demand for meme coins is driven by marketing budgets and market makers. As soon as the cost of keeping a meme alive exceeds the revenue from its trading, teams don’t improve the product. They launch a new meme.

Crises can accelerate the fall to zero. But tokens stay there not because of macro events, but because of their irrelevance. We have already covered this earlier.

Now look at the scale.

🤯 11.6 million tokens launched in a single year. That is 31,780 tokens every day. No weekends. No holidays.

At that pace, you barely have time to come up with a name, let alone build real tokenomics.

🚨 Dubai’s financial regulator (DFSA) has banned the use of privacy tokens and services within the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), citing AML risks and sanctions compliance concerns.

The restrictions cover privacy-focused cryptocurrencies such as Zcash (ZEC) and Monero (XMR), along with all related activity. Under the new rules, companies must be able to identify every participant involved in a crypto transaction.

The timing is hard to ignore. The ban comes just as interest in privacy coins is picking up. In 2025, Zcash traded as high as $540, and Monero has now set a new all-time high at $565.

🌎 Price action may be strong, but regulatory pressure on anonymous tokens continues to tighten worldwide.

Why isn’t DeFi making money where the money already is? 💸🤔

Many traders have already noticed how much U.S. macro data now drives crypto price action. Scroll through any crypto trading feed and you’ll see entire strategies built around specific macro indicators.

Today, crypto traders watch the same things traditional market traders do: Federal Funds Rate, PCE Price Index, Non Farm Payrolls, even oil inventory data. So why?

Because the real drivers of token prices are large, professional investors with serious capital. And those investors always have a choice of where and when to allocate. Crypto is just one tool in their portfolio. Most crypto projects, however, are still ignoring this shift.

Here’s a simple example 👇

The Federal Reserve cuts rates. The dollar gets cheaper and more accessible. Deposits and bonds start yielding less. Credit becomes cheaper.

At that point, investors go looking for alternatives and start paying attention to crypto.

And they usually have two basic options:

➡️ buy tokens,
➡️ or park capital in DeFi.

And this is where DeFi should shine.

For an investor rotating out of bonds, DeFi offers passive yield with relatively low risk. Exactly what they want. But there’s a catch.

Today, crypto is leaving money on the table.

An investor buys $USDT, goes into Aave, locks the stablecoins and that’s it. The $AAVE token is not required in this flow. No buying pressure. No demand or price growth 📉

The economics could have been designed differently. DeFi could be capturing far more value from rate cut cycles.

But for now, it’s simply letting that opportunity slip away 🤷‍♂️

🇬🇧 Ripple secured an EMI license from the UK FCA. The market barely reacted – and that’s a mistake.

This license allows Ripple to legally process fiat payments and run full payment flows within the UK. Ripple’s payment infrastructure is built on XRPL, where XRP functions as a native settlement asset, not a currency and not a speculative token.

Ripple didn’t wait for regulators to label $XRP as money. Instead, the token is structured as a native accounting asset inside a licensed payment system. This is the part the market keeps missing.

💡 This is exactly the model we recommend to clients when they need to legalize transactions through their own token.

The structure is straightforward:
1) users buy the token for fiat from a licensed partner,
2) pay for services on the platform using the token,
3) and the platform sells the tokens back to the partner for fiat.

From a regulatory perspective, this is treated as a fiat payment. The token is only an internal accounting tool within the partner’s digital money system. The only real requirement is a licensed partner authorized to operate with digital money.

⏳ Price action is secondary. The real impact comes when actual payment flows start moving through the system.